A YEAR WITHOUT RENT IN PARK CITY: “OK, GOOD” AND “HEAVY GIRLS”

One of the trickier things about reviewing movies at a festival is that your identity isn’t exactly a secret. You’ve got a press pass with your name and the name of your outlet on it, so a lot of conversations you have with filmmakers revolve around that very fact. Or you end up in a long conversation at the Kickstarter party with the director of a film you hated. But my philosophy is if you can’t stand face-to-face with someone and defend your opinion of their work, then you have no business telling it to anyone else. Comments and critiques from behind the veil of anonymity are cowardly and childish and harmful. There’s no place for them in the indie film community.

Which brings us to Daniel Martinico’s Ok, Good, essentially a one-man show of struggling actor Hugo Armstrong and his endless string of rejections. We watch Armstrong go through commercial audition after commercial audition, all of them for things like laundry detergent and potting soil and any number of things you don’t necessarily care about.

But Armstrong cares. He cares deeply, spending hours poring over scripts and rehearsing even the simplest things like how he introduces himself to the casting director. He’s meticulous. Maybe too meticulous. He finds a flaw in the duplication of his headshot, and the rectification of that pretty much becomes his life mission for awhile.

It wears on him and we start to see his processes fall apart, little by little. All the while, he’s attending these acting workshops where a bunch of actors pace around a room, screaming at each other and doing some bizarre form of yoga and, well, all sorts of weird shit. It’s all very primal and you half expect them to be getting psyched up for a football game. But I guess that’s what they do.

What’s probably most impressive about Ok, Good is the cinematography. Martinico shot it himself and it looks fantastic, with an attention to detail that dovetails beautifully with Armstrong’s preparations. The audition footage looks appropriately terrible, but everything is well-frame, each shot serving a purpose. It’s all the more impressive when you consider that the crew was probably no one.

It all leads to an ending that’s kind of terrifying in it’s brutality and finality. I’m still not sure how I feel about it, but for sure it gets under your skin in a way very few films do. The entire third act is so raw, so brutal, that it forces you to confront it. Or, you can walk out. And a lot of people walked out. It’s a shame, because love it or hate it, isn’t that why you come to a festival, to see stuff that pushes your buttons?

I mean, I get walking out if the film is inept, but when the film is obviously well-made, I don’t see the point. Although, the older man sitting in front of me showed up late, spent 20 minutes surfing Match.com on his phone, and accidentally took my jacket. I was glad when he walked out.

The next day, I talked to Daniel and Hugo about their film when I ran into them at a party. I hadn’t written this yet, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about the film. I’m still not. We talked about that for a good ten minutes. It’s a difficult film, hard to watch and even harder to enjoy. It would be easy to hate, but impossible to not respect on some level.

I kind of feel the same way about Dicke Mädchen (Heavy Girls), Axel Ranisch’s film about 2 somewhat large, middle-aged men sort of kind of falling in love.

The film stars Heiko Pinkowski as Sven, a sad man who works at a bank and lives with his mother and her dementia. She has a helper (Peter Trabner) who watches her during the day. And Sven is in love with him in the cutest, puppy dog way you could imagine.

The film is incredibly sweet, anchored by a incredible performance by Pinkowski that slowly builds over the course of the narrative. It sneaks up you, really.

Thing is, the film looks terrible. So much so, it’s difficult to watch. According to the press notes, they shot the film on miniDV on a consumer-level camera, “in order to attain the greatest amount of creative freedom and authenticity”. There’s a lot to be said for that, but the film still looks terrible, and detrimentally so. The whole film is shot with auto exposure and (I think) auto focus, so there’s large parts of the film where you can’t see an actor’s face in places where you really, really want to see the actor’s face. And it never feels like a choice. It feels like no one knows how to work the camera. There’s authenticity and then there’s basic competency. You can accomplish the former by using the latter and lose nothing in the process. That’s what’s so frustrating about the film. It’s such a good story and so well acted and with an extra 20 minutes of pre-production, it would be a really impressive film.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Mitch

Excuse me, Lucas — in what way was my criticism anonymous? I signed my name – my FULL NAME. Was that not enough for you? Should I enclose my social security number, too? What exactly do you need before acknowledging criticism?

Oh, right. You wanted specifics. Okay, here goes:

Your film, blanc de blanc, is a boring, amateurish mess. It is agonizingly uneventful, and its bland execution does little to mask its absolute lack of creative ambition. The “story” – or lack thereof – relies on the cheesiest of all Hollywood cliches (amnesia) and doesn’t even make literal sense without the aid of a tedious Q&A, during which you laboriously explain details you failed to implement in the script (another practice you hypocritically disdain). The dialogue and music are aimless, as are all other aspects of this forgettable production.

Your positive reviews were browbeaten out of friends in exchange for glowing reviews of their work. Other “anonymous” critics have documented this quite thoroughly.

Anonymity in no way invalidates criticism — if anything, it bolsters its credibility, in that the criticism is more likely to be HONEST, rather than suger-coated or avoided altogether for the sake of diplomacy.

When you shamelessly self-promote and misrepresent the quality of your work as you do, you invite this sort of criticism. To dismiss it as the ire of “haters” who hate you, personally, is cowardice.

-Mitchell Simon Lerner

SS# 214-**-****

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com Scott Macaulay

I just want to weigh in with a mild disagreement here regarding anonymous comments. Obviously, we’ve made the decision to allow them here. Yes, they can be abused, but on balance I believe people should be able to comment anonymously on the internet. Or, more often, comment from the vantage point of an internet handle that is distinct from their professional or personal persona. There are many instances in which people will venture forth an honest opinion anonymously that they wouldn’t if their name was attached. In other instances, commenting anonymously is a political act. There are plenty of people for whom anonymous commenting redresses power imbalances. Now, these instances may be more within political discourse than indie-film criticism, but I believe you have to adopt values and be consistent with them across all your various activities.

Finally, if the powers-that-be at various internet behemoths have their way, we may be in the twilight years of internet anonymity. There are plenty of people who are advocating that we do away with it entirely by imposing a sort of internet identity card. That means, every flame war on every forum will instantly be tied to every search by an employer, the government, the IRS. So, I saw, be anonymous while you can.

Anonymous

I very much agree with you, Scott, and appreciate your articulate, thoughtful comment.

(I am choosing to remain anonymous to demonstrate how anonymous feedback can also be positive!)

:-)

Anonymous

I’m ambivalent about anonymous comments on the Internet. I
stopped obscuring my identity several years ago because I didn’t like
what I was writing. It lacked nuance, what nuance that I possess. I was easily
pushed into nastiness. My fire-wall burnt too fast! And I often left the site with
increased rage, not less, followed by a chicken-hearted feeling instead of any sense
of empowerment. Interestingly, or maybe not, most often when I delayed posting one
of those hot “true from the heart” comments, I would delete what I had written.
Sometimes I would then write a comment that was more congruent with my thoughts and
less with my emotions. Yet, a nasty day of dreadful happings at work, riding a transport of bourbon in the recovery room … can overwhelm identity posting. Sometimes
you no longer give a crap. On the other hand, I am utterly bored with the ubiquitous
butt-kissing … my-friend-good-or-bad … postings that gut comment
sections of genuine honesty and feelings. And I’m petrified what the swarming power elite — both online and off — want to do with our open, honest, raw – yes, raw with brains — Internet expression.
As I said, I’m ambivalent. So I do what I think is best for me. Use my name. Well, most of it.

Ashton

Wow. I am kind of morbidly curious to see the “blanc” film now… is it online?

(for free, I would not pay after those comments lol)

Mitch

How about sending your film to someone who *isn’t* your friend? That’d be a good start. Try your luck with a legitimate, independent review site before fraudulently claiming your film is “adored by critics and audiences alike” when the tagline should really read “liked by my friends when I begged them to say something nice about it”. That’s browbeating.

btw- I have not seen the film you linked to in your review, but it sounds like it has much in common with your own.